Recalling the 2006 Copenhagen conference, Mr. Rashid noted the diversity of the participants: “You had various Sunni Muslims, various Shia Muslims — progressive, conservative, liberal, reactionary, if you will — but all coming together at the same table to talk about how we can make the world a better place. And I am really looking forward to continuing those conversations at this conference now.”
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Hussein Rashid, a Harvard University doctoral student who is from New York, joked that he should take Obama as his middle name.
“I’m old enough to have been through both Gulf wars, growing up with the name Hussein,” he said. “If people are saying ‘Barack Hussein Obama,’ it takes it away from Saddam Hussein. And you know what, overall it’s a positive thing.
“People did mean it as a slur, but we saw after the election that most of this country didn’t see it that way,” he said. “At least my name is not associated with this horrible Iraqi dictator but with our new president- elect.”
Muslims and the 2008 Presidential Election (More specific link)
Swiftboating Obama: Renowned Muslim Scholar Couldn’t Publish Apostasy Response
Shortly after the Op-Ed’s appearance Ingrid Mattson, Daisy Khan, Hussein Rashid, Ali Eteraz and probably numerous other Muslim scholars and writers responded, all noting more or less the same thing: that this is a poor read of Shari’a and that the Muslim world is far too variegated to make such a sweeping statement.
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Hussein Rashid, a Queens-born Shiite Muslim with a blog called islamicate.com, said that if the talk turns to the Middle East, he would fall back on the experience he had coexisting with a college roommate “who was incredibly pro-Israel. We argued and we fought, but at the end of the day we realized it was a political dispute, and we agreed to disagree.”
Rashid considers himself “a voice of Islam’s silent majority.” A doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Rashid said the conference “will allow us to talk across traditions. That is the wonderful thing about this.”
Hussein